Cliff Notes – Dembélé’s Ballon d’Or win feels like the dawn of a new era
- Ousmane Dembélé’s victory at the Ballon d’Or marks a significant achievement, leading PSG to their first treble and showcasing a thrilling, unpredictable style of play reminiscent of football’s early stars.
- Lamine Yamal, at just 18, becomes the youngest player to reach the Ballon d’Or podium, highlighting a new generation of talent that prioritises creativity and risk-taking in a game increasingly dominated by tactical systems.
Dembélé’s Ballon d’Or win feels like the dawn of a new era
Graham HunterSep 22, 2025, 10:14 PM
CloseGraham Hunter is a Barcelona-based freelance writer for ESPN.com who specializes in La Liga and the Spanish national team.
Fifty-nine years on from the first Ballon d’Or Award, at a time when many complain that the global game is becoming asphyxiated by systems, technology and teams that cancel each other out, two street-style footballers, Ousmane Dembélé and Lamine Yamal — two men whose body language lies to defenders, whose attacking anarchy makes fans feel volcanic joy and excitement — have dominated the voting and fought out a thrilling battle to be named the world’s best player.
The fact that Dembélé led his team, Paris Saint-Germain, to their first treble by finally making them European champions, meant he pipped the teenage Catalan genius who now becomes, by two full years, ahead of Ronaldo Nazário, Leo Messi and Gianni Rivera (who were all 20) the youngest ever to reach the Ballon D’Or podium.
Bronze position went to the laudable and exceptionally talented Vitinha. For him to win the glorious trophy treble with his club, PSG, and then add the Nations League with Portugal, only to still not win the most glorious individual trophy simply illustrates the quality of the two men who finished in front of him.
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But what a beautiful echo of the very first award in 1956 when three skill-heavy geniuses, Sir Stanley Matthews, Alfredo di Stéfano and Raymond Kopa were held up as the top three players — each of them maverick in style. They were mesmerizing, daring, pandemonium-causing diminutive men who would run at defenders, trick them, taunt them and send the hundreds of thousands who watched them play each week at stadiums — almost never live on TV — wild with admiration and pulsating joy.
Back then, the wider world only caught glimpses of the magicians: There was no internet, and no constant live football on TV. But even with the advent of wall-to-wall coverage and the apparently irresistible rise and rise of computer planned schemes to render opponent teams toothless, to nullify talent — what remains today is our love for the guys who produce the unexpected. We call them soccer’s Rhinestone Cowboys.
Ousmane 🫂 Yamal#ballondor pic.twitter.com/aMOZ9gKXQT
— Ballon d’Or (@ballondor) September 22, 2025
Really, Dembélé and Lamine are the game’s confidence tricksters.
If you want to call them magicians instead, that’s fine. But the 28-year-old Frenchman and his 18-year-old former club mate (at Barcelona) use their shoulders, their hips, their eyes and, above all, their body language to tell lies to defenders.
Their modus operandi is: I’m going this way, look, it’s obvious … trust me, everything your senses tell you proves it: make a decision, commit … OOPS! Bye-bye! The crowd is roaring, my team’s going to score, you’re in an embarrassed heap and what’s worse, I’m going to do it again in five minutes.
It’s a perpetual “me-versus-you” street contest. The epitome of the park or schoolyard concrete playground style in its purest, most identifiable form.
A few weeks ago, Dembélé told me during a Champions Journal interview: “My first memories weren’t on a pitch … just a local park and we used to shoot the ball against a wall. We always gave everything! My friends and I would play so many matches throughout the day — there were many bruises. I grazed my knees and bled a few times there!”
We all now see the benefits of what he learned there in Vernon, on the banks of the River Seine. But everything he and Lamine learned in those parks is now played in front of audiences of many billions, under crushing pressure, with many more billions of Euros, dollars and pounds at stake.
Dembélé’s sensational season for PSG has been rewarded with soccer’s ultimate individual prize. However, it’s also vindication for his thrilling, direct style of play, one that is harder to find in the modern era. FRANCK FIFE/AFP via Getty Images
When Frank Rijkaard was Barcelona coach 20 years ago, trying to bring Ronaldinho and Leo Messi together in the same team, he told me about his background as a street player in Amsterdam. “It was all-in,” he said. “Every trick you had, one team giving everything in kill-or-be-killed mode, on the hard cobbled street, chased away by the cops when we were bouncing the ball off cars or apartment windows … then it was the two best players from the two best teams. One-on-one, me-versus-you … and the winner was the ‘king.'”
That’s the same school Lamine and Ousmane come from.
What the voters loved about them wasn’t simply their (aggregate) eight-trophy haul over the past calendar year, but the fact that in a time when world events are challenging us to feel happy and carefree, these guys produce the spirit-lifting, cheeky, jaw-dropping “catch-me-if-you-can” soccer we all tried to play when we were kids, the variety everyone dreams about at night when we are dribbling past seven defenders and scoring into the top corner.
It’s as if this magical Ballon d’Or duo brings us shots of notional B12 without the injections. Cotton candy without the calories. But although they are unified by the genre of players into which they fit, unified by risk-taking and entertainment-providing, these two literally could not be more different in their make-up or trajectory.
For years, Dembélé was considered a man-child: overwhelmed by the cornucopia of his technical and athletic talents; unprepared for the flood of pressure his ability would unleash; well-liked by teammates but infuriating to coaches and fans — the ultimate “late developer.”
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Lamine is not from a different planet than Dembélé. No: He’s from a whole different universe. He’s the epitome of the phrase “born ready” — he has a high soccer IQ and, while still aged 16 and 17, instantly able to look at teammates 10 or more years older than him and know he’s already vastly superior to them (but remain humble about it). He is a mind and a character not only wholly equipped to plan world domination, but to deliver the goods with a never-before-seen precocity and, meanwhile, to produce weeks and months where he carries club and country on his back. Aged 18.
When Dembélé was 18, in 2015, an intermediary I know took the Rennes winger to Manchester City with a view to setting up a move. French World Cup winner Patrick Vieira was head of Man City’s Elite Development Squad and held the interview. It was the second time Dembélé had been over to the City campus, but this time would be enough to discourage him and, in due course, propel him into the arms of Borussia Dortmund.
My contact recalls Vieira telling the prodigious teenager “You could become one of the best players in our Academy.” No harm to Dembélé, but at that exact same stage Yamal is European and Spanish champion, has been sought after by the biggest clubs, PSG and Bayern, since he was barely 15, has scored the goal of UEFA Euro 2024 and the UEFA technical observers’ 2024-25 Goal of the Champions League season.
They are similarly gifted and fun to watch, but utterly different in how they have developed, how they were viewed as youngsters and, with full respect to tonight’s winner in Paris, wholly different in the special “stuff” it takes to cope with having been given prodigious gifts. Both of these guys share a background of being identified and trained by Xavi Hernández — himself cruelly denied first place on the Ballon d’Or podium in 2010 because Leo Messi is the greatest player ever and second place finisher, Andrés Iniesta, scored the World Cup final winning goal.
When Xavi made his presentation to the Barcelona board in November 2021, pitching to take over from the sacked Ronald Koeman, he told the Camp Nou directors: “I can make Ousmane Dembélé the best player in the world.”
Even after the talents that the French winger had shown at Barça, there was so little faith in him that some directors laughed at the suggestion. By the time Dembélé left — having been fundamental in the team that won the Spanish title — he had transformed into a footballer PSG were desperate to bring in and pay a salary Barcelona couldn’t match.
Now, two seasons later, here he is — named as precisely the “achiever” Xavi promised he could forge out of the underachieving attacker, who at the time had been injury-prone, hapless, immature, frustrating, friendly but happy-go-lucky.
Yamal, left, and Dembélé, barely overlapped at Barcelona, but the pair share many similarities when it comes to how they approach the game. Jean Catuffe/Getty Images
Dembélé and Lamine played together in Blaugrana just once. On the Spaniard’s debut at Camp Nou, against Real Betis, 15 years, 9 months and 16 days old. Jordi Cruyff, at the time Barcelona’s director of football, tells the tale of how Xavi was so stunned by “young” Lamine’s talent and football maturity that he wanted to give that debut many months earlier. Particularly in light of his friend and former teammate, Iván De la Peña, having warned him that before Lamine moved to be represented by super-agent Jorge Mendes, Bayern Munich had made it crystal clear to De la Peña that they would move heaven and earth financially to secure the newly-15 year old Catalan phenomenon.
Xavi, as had been done to him by Louis van Gaal a quarter of a century earlier, accelerated Lamine’s white-hot apprenticeship, trusted him, took responsibility for teaching him when the kid was 15 and 16 — fair to say now that his fingerprints are on both these respective triumphs. But the ultimate triumph, it’s arguable, is for soccer.
Let the scientists and the analysts use their algorithms and artificial intelligence in perpetuity, attempting to help negative coaches deny space, invention, time, creativity and thrills in the ranks of their opponents. What we, the public, love are players with snake-hipped swaying, the guys who tell a defender one thing then do quite the opposite. The risk takers, the anarchists the thrill-seekers and the thrill givers.
First Ousmane Dembélé, second Lamine Yamal, third Vitinha: that’s the order of the day in Paris. But the old order, established in 1956, will never, ever change: Soccer is fun, daring and it’s for those who tell lies with their body language and leave their rivals lost, lonely and looking forlorn. Vive Ousmane, viva Lamine Yamal.